How Potassium Can help Control High Blood Pressure
For many people who suffer from high blood pressure and especially after the release of the new guidelines reducing the levels for high blood pressure to 130mmHg (1). More people will now fall into the High blood pressure category, now I hate to be cynical, but I suspect this is so big Pharma can profit from not only increased sales in blood pressure medications, but also for those statin manufacturers so much so that an additional 25% of the US population will now require some sort of blood pressure despite them being asymptomatic.
Why is it Physicians are trigger happy and want you to reach for the medicine bottle without giving you some simple healthy lifestyle modifications first??
I am often baffled by this and even more surprised that people are happy to go along with this and are happy to pop pills without looking for alternative ways to treat these medical conditions.
One very easy and simple to treat High blood pressure is by ensuring that your salt levels are adequate, and before you say wait doesn't salt increase your blood pressure, or my doctor has put me on a low salt diet to treat my high blood pressure. The "salt" you are talking about is Sodium Chloride or NaCl, I am not talking about that salt I am talking about Potassium, with the optimum forms being Potassium Bicarbonate or Potassium Citrate.
The recommended daily allowance for Potassium is 4700mg a day, and sadly we are not getting enough potassium in our daily diets. a Banana for example has about 358mg of potassium and a potato has about 421mg and avocados have 485mg. So, in order to meet your daily allowance you would need to eat the equivalence of 1kg of potatoes a day just to meet your daily requirement.
if you are wanting to know how much potassium is inside an ingredient I recommend check with one of the nutritional databases such as Nutrition Data
So what does this mean for me..... well for one thing people tend to neglect the amount of potassium they are eating on a daily basis the ration of Potassium to Sodium chloride should be 4:1 so if you are having 4g of Potassium a day you should be limiting your Sodium Chloride to 1g and so forth. When you consume optimal amounts of Potassium it helps you to lose additional sodium through your urine, Potassium also helps the blood vessels relax and lowering blood pressure.
Now I must mention that if you are interested in taking Potassium at optimal levels, but currently on Antihypertensive medications or have Chronic Kidney disease, it certainly is advisable to speak to your physician to make sure you are not going to be at risk of developing hyper (too much) or Hypo (too little)kalemia (potassium in the blood)
Now that being said if you are healthy with no significant health issues it is pretty safe to take, and I take 3 to 4 teaspoons daily spread throughout the day. If you have any questions about this or are unsure about how to start taking supplemental potassium please feel free to contact me. either here or on discord @rob menzies#6347
You can lose potassium fairly quickly during vomiting and chronic diarrhea. Once my Dad's potassium level was so below 1.5 his heart muscles almost stopped beating. Just to take note
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Yes Sadly when people become dehydrated they neglect the Potassium and only concentrate on the sodium, there are marked differences between potassium and sodium depletion, but more than often they are missed by most physicians.
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That opens a bunch of questions for me.
First, do we need that amount of potassium because of other factors, such as overeating other nutrients or other modern stressors? If we reduce those, do we need less potassium?
If we have always needed that much potassium, how did healthy traditional tribes get that amount of K without being able to supplement?
My family has a tendency to restless leg, and I manage that by taking magnesium every day, The form I take, which is supposed to be best for RLS, is a Mg / K complex, which gives me 180 mg K per day. That's nowhere near the amount you recommend, but I wonder now if it's the K that helps me more than the Mg.
Oh, one more Q - is that the recommended amount of K for everybody, or only if you have high blood pressure?
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If we reduce the stress on our body that will obviously help as far as cortisol, and the other stress hormones are concerned and may reduce some of the factors associated with stress. However these Potassium recommendations are for the best part are a recommended daily allowance which should be required for proper biological and physiological processes to occur unhindered so even if we do reduce our stressors we should maintain this level of potassium. Sadly the vast majority are eating a rather potassium deplete diet, and over compensating with sodium chloride, because when people think of salt, sadly they don't think of salts such as potassium or magnesium they only really consider sodium.
Excellent question and I had to do a bit of research on what the Maori used to eat, I believe they had some excellent agricultural skill and able to grow yams and vines and palms, along with fungi, and they had sources of meat from fish, and birds and not to forget the kiore, and the Kuri 1 So all of these foods undoubtedly were high in potassium, in those days people would tend to eat everything from the snout to the tail of an animal, now people are far more selective about what they eat.
Potassium is one of the most important electrolytes for muscle health and quality of contractions hence why cardiac arrhythmias are highly influenced by this. but the same is true for all our muscles insufficient levels can affect the nerve potentials and may lead to RLS, that said I know many people who swear by Magnesium rubs and the like. I prefer Magnesium Malate, A lot of people take the wrong form of magnesium and end up spending most of the time running to the bathroom :)
Yes The Recommended daily allowance of potassium is not set in stone to be honest but its certainly a minimum that you should be trying to achieve sometimes depending on what I am eating I can get up to 8g per day but thats not always. I would suggest trying to optimize the amount from foods, and topping up with the potassium citrate or bicarbonate, I just have the potassium in my glass of water morning afternoon and evening. seems to do the job.
I hope this helped you out.
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This is a great read, I think that might be part of my problem, I am eating healthy but I don't eat enough so for example I will have a main meal in the day but sometimes its the only thing that I eat. But I do make sure to fill the plate up with vegetables and a little meat, I certainly do not go over on the salt. Bulgarians try to get me to add more salt to my food but I just cannot do that. They seem to have a high amount of salt in everything, recently though our neighbour has been in hospital last year due to high blood pressure, and was told to decrease his salt intake, interestingly enough he was told to cut back on the meat as he loves pork, which I believe is high in salt also. I will be looking for potassium supplements on monday and will speak to my specialist about this also. Thanks Rob.
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@crazybgadventure, this is the interesting thing, but what we now consider "healthy" isn't really that healthy, and in later posts I will get to this, but the most important thing to do is to correct your Potassium to Sodium Ratio as I mentioned to 4:1.
Eating one big meal a day isn't that much of an issue, so long as you make sure you get in the adequate amounts of protein, as far as Fat and carbohydrates are concerned they are less important as far as repair and regeneration is concerned.
I suspect if the Pork Meat is cured, if so then it may well be high in salt and sugar (as part of the brining process), both of which won't help with high blood pressure Below are the two recommended forms of potassium which are good, these are a good base to take daily and the remainder you can get from food sources.
Potassium Citrate
Potassium Bicarbonate
please note there are no referral codes for these links so you might have to google for discount codes if you want to try to get them at discount.
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the one thing i did right in my detox right?!?!?!?! hahahaha This was an excellent article Rob!!! I think you're completely right of course. American doctors (with a small exception of functional medicine doctors) are so quick to prescribe a pill for the ill. it's so sad. but Americans are partly to blame. We don't demand nutrition as our medicine (because we are addicted and unwilling to do what it takes to REALLY get healthy)
I think you will have a stronger following the more you speak about these things!!! People are really hungry for change, but just need to have little ways to change first. The tips in your posts are wonderful ways to start making little changes! a little at a time - and there will be real change!
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It will come with time same as everything else, when people realise they are actually causing themselves harm, or sadly for most parts they can't afford the medications especially in the US. People will start to seek out alternatives which are healthier.
Hippocrates the father of medicine once said " Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food" 431 B.C.
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oh yeah - and i have a hilarious picture to show you when i get back on land.... and by the way - i tried to register for that crypto game... and you totally have to walk me through how to register! LOL (remember - use sock puppets hahaha) i don't have a wallet?!?!?!
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you shouldn't have a wallet anyway!! you should have a purse. For this you need an ERC-20 compatible wallet I use personally (ImToken).
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